19 November 2010

After five years in Ecuador (and a little last minute begging) I found that there were a few spaces left on the TROPICAL BIRDING GALAPAGOS ENDEMICS CRUISE, (guided by Andres Vasquez) and swiftly pulled some strings and got myself on board for my very first adventure to the Galapagos. These islands are famed for being the spark for Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection. This came about from his observations of the many confusing finches on the islands...

We landed on the island ofBaltra, nearly tripped over some Land Iguanas basking by the dock, (photo), picked up our first endemic-Galapagos Dove, and our first "Darwin's" finch-Medium Ground-Finch, then boarded our yacht, The Fragata, and set sail for nearby Santa Cruz island...

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Greater Praire-Chicken

WHO is Sam Woods?

A pair of tits (Blue and Great) in a London park 30 years back changed my life; I became a birder, and an obsessive birder by the following weekend. Works like Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book and Richard Millington's A Twitcher's Diary helped in no small part to nurture this in my formative years.
30 years on I am still an avid birder but have also learnt to appreciate other sectors of the natural world, especially frogs and primates in particular, through the undoubted influence of David Attenborough The Great and others. I now work as a full-time professional tour leader for Tropical Birding Tours, and now reside in the Andes of Ecuador. I love my job, sharing birds with people provides every bit of a buzz as a lifebird, which, of course, still creates a wave of excitement every time. I have been lucky enough to see well over 6550 bird species on my travels, which does not make me any more talented than anyone else, just one that is always greedy and impatient for more, which has taken me to all seven continents, and always yearning for that ONE...MORE...B-I-R-D!
I use Swarovski binoculars & scope, & shoot with Canon 7D and Canon 400m f5.6L lens.